Ahh, Copyright And Protecting The Artist’s Natural Rights

Charles M. Schulz never wanted to publish his “Peanuts” cartoons in full: all of them, start to finish, in order.

A leading cartoon publisher offered to do just that a few years before Schultz died in 2000. He begged off. Nobody wants to read that old stuff, he said, and they’re not very good. Forty-nine years of strips? Good grief.

But now his widow, Jean Schulz, has authorized the publication of all of her husband’s work, with the first volume, 1950 through 1952, out this week.

Though not without a vague pang of guilt. “You feel a little disloyal,” she confessed, speaking in her office upstairs in the two-year-old Charles M. Schulz Museum here. “A little bit. He didn’t want to do this.” The airy, modernist structure is a few hundred yards from where Mr. Schulz drew his comic strip every day.